Some Final Thoughts on Thailand

Wow, it's hard to believe that our month in Thailand is over. Although it was a bit of a challenge (not to mention my own personal struggle), it was a great adventure! The country was beautiful, the people were fantastic, and the food was great.

From Krabi, we took an ovrenight bus to Bangkok, which left us standing in the middle of the backpacker's district bleary-eyed early on Sunday morning. We made our way to our guest house in Chinatown and then spent the day exploring the weekend market and Siam Square. The weekend market was incredible! It was absolutely massive; a person could very easily get lost in the maze of stalls and tents. Just about everything under the sun was for sale: cloths, jewelery, food, plants, crats, supplies for crafts, pets, pet supplies, home decore, material, artwork.....and we only saw a small fraction of it! It was jam-packed with locals and tourists alike, and was pretty hot and close under the heat of the sun.

In search of other shopping experiences and a little A.C., we went to Siam Square, a posh area with modern-style malls. Some of the stores were really high end, while others had cheap knock-offs of the high end stuff. There were restaurants, an aquarium of sorts, food market, department store, opera hall, bowling ally, and outdoor concert venue where a public concert of sorts was on into the night. Along the walkways between the various buildings, vendors were hawking their wares. It was an interesting mix of the modern and traditional, inexpensive and very pricey, shopping styles. Part way through, we succumbed to temtation and treated ourselves to (gasp!) iced mocha's from Starbucks. I'm such a sucker for coffee shops!

We had a very hot and rather uncomfortable and restless sleep at our guest house (because of the heat) and were up at 5:30 the next morning to catch a train to the airport. Although our flight didn't leave until 4:00pm, we wanted to use the train to save money (only 10 Baht per person instead of 400 Baht per person for a taxi!) and to make sure that Corinne could get on the flight. We had a little mix up when we booked the tickets and didn't realize until we were well into Thailand that the date on Corinne's ticket was March 30 instead of March 27. Luckily, there was room on the March 27 flights, so we both flew together.

After seven hours of waiting at the Bangkok airport, a 2.5 hour flight to Singapore, a 1 hour stop-over in Singapore there's free internet at that airport!), and a 7.5 hour flight to Sydney, we arrived here in Sydney bleary-eyed but very happy to be here. We've yet to explore the city (doing laundry right now), but from first glance, it looks wonderful!

Our trip to Thailand was an excellent experience and I met a lot of really wonderful people there. It was also a time of self-discovery and personal growth that at times was not very easy. But all in all, I'm very glad we went there and I'm taking alot back with me. However, I'm very happy to be in Oz!